A Question Of Agency?

[Fenris-77]

I'm curious what the sandbox practitioners think of that approach - it's obviously quite different from a discovery-oriented hexcrawl.

I think doing a discovery-oriented hexcrawl in historical Europe would have to be handled differently anyway. The geography, broadly speaking at least, is a known quantity, as are the the cultures and whatnot in play. I think your approach sounds about right for the game you're running (and I'm talking about the map plus all of your accounts of play that I've read).

 

[hawkeyefan]

I think doing a discovery-oriented hexcrawl in historical Europe would have to be handled differently anyway. The geography, broadly speaking at least, is a known quantity, as are the the cultures and whatnot in play. I think your approach sounds about right for the game you're running (and I'm talking about the map plus all of your accounts of play that I've read).

So this is an interesting thought and it touches on something I’ve been thinking about as I’ve been catching up on this thread.

Very often, a sandbox is about discovery....the exploration of a geographic space and learning what is out there. Very often, these spaces are described as frontiers, with all the inherent dangers that would imply.

But I don’t think that this is the case for all sandboxes, by any means.

To revisit Blades in the Dark, it’s definitely a sandbox. But the characters are all denizens of the city. They know the sandbox, geographically speaking. So the players’ goal, and the characters’ as well, has to be about some other form of discovery.

Then I was just kind of thinking that there is no actual geography, of course....it’s all fictional, the geography of the map is just an illusion that creates certain pathways. It’s a kind of flow chart.

This format can be applied to the unknown frontier or to the city the characters grew up in, or a space sector or any other setting. It’s just that the setting will demand different uses of the “boxes” on the flowchart.

It seems to me that what’s in each “box” on the flowchart and how it’s determined are, perhaps, the point of differentiation when it comes to sandbox play. Perhaps even all play.

 

[FrogReaver]

I dislike GM fiat for action resolution. Framing a scene is not action resolution.

Right. I wasn't trying to claim you were being inconsistent.

As I believe I already posted a way upthread, and reiterated not far at all upthread, avoiding the forest or avoiding encountering the Bone Laird and his men is not a goal of play.

The orientation of play in no way resembles a traditional dungeon crawl, in which the goal is to explore and thus loot the dungeon while taking the minimum losses to encounters.

Right. I understand many sandboxes are played in such a way where the "right" solution is the solution which gets them the most XP or loot for minimal losses.

But the particular subset of sandboxes I keep coming back to isn't played that way, or at least doesn't have to be. The players decide their own goals. That goal can be "XP and loot for minimal losses" or it could be "help the ghosts in the forest because it's the right thing to do" or "ghosts suck, lets get the heck out of this haunted forest and continue on our merry way to wherever we were going before this."

Encountering ghosts like you describe isn't something I personally would have preplanned for any particular forest. It would most likely come up either from a random encounter roll or fiat. Not that there's anything wrong having it tied to a particular map location. That's just not my style.

The nearest analogue to XP in Prince Valiant is fame, which is earned primarily by performing "notably successful" deeds and can also be earned for doing notable things even if they don't succeed. Unlike a classic dungeon crawl, though, it doesn't really require skill as a player to earn fame, or certainly not the sort of skill that is involved in successfully taking loot from a dungeon. As long as you play your character in a way that conforms to or evokes stereotypes of romantic, Arthurian-style fantasy - anywhere between Excalibur and A Knight's tale will do - then you should find yourself earning fame for your PC.

There is no point in the players trying to avoid encountering the Bone Laird. That would be the same as avoiding playing the game; it's analogue in Moldvay Basic play would be not entering the dungeon and instead returning to the village to work the fields of one's farm. (Of course, once the PCs have encountered the Bone Laird and his fellow ghosts they might try and sneak or parley past them. Two of the PCs in fact did that. But that takes place in the domain of action resolution, not scene-framing.)

If the players think that the Bone Laird is a poorly-conceived situation, Prince Valiant doesn't give them the same mechanical resources as BW players have (and in relation to which I quoted the relevant principles upthread). They would have to use out-of-game devices - eg conversation - to indicate what they want to do. Of course those devices are available even if the players don't think a scenario is poorly conceived. It's precisely because the players, via out-of-game conversation, indicated that they wanted to take their order on Crusade that the action of the game has moved from Britain to France to Italy to Dacia to Anatolia and now to Cyprus. But none of that geographical change has depended upon action resolution except for one or two occasions when I've called for Brawn checks to determine whether and to what extent the characters are suffering from fatigue.

Right. The more you talk about your play and mine the less I think there's some huge divide in how our games function in practice. I mean there is a huge divide between us on preferences for meta mechanics and also on preference for action resolution mechanics. But how you describe the actual play of meeting the ghosts in the forest and not treating them as some obstacle to treasure, that's totally part of the kinds of sandboxes I'm talking about.

I guess I should note that I'm not a huge fan of XP only being obtained for killing monsters. So I award XP more for what's accomplished in play instead of just killing monsters. Mostly ensures players know they will be able to level even if they don't murder hobo everything in sight - which helps most get over the kill everything mindset.

 

[pemerton]

Encountering ghosts like you describe isn't something I personally would have preplanned for any particular forest. It would most likely come up either from a random encounter roll or fiat. Not that there's anything wrong having it tied to a particular map location. That's just not my style.

I didn't have it tied to a particular location. I had it tied to a particular session - in the sense that I'd looked through the Episode Book for something good to run, and the Bone Laird looked like it - and therefore I framed the PCs into a forest. That forest could have been in Britain, or France, or anywhere else there are forests. As it happened, I used a forest in Dacia/Romania.

 

[pemerton]

Moldvay Basic is a million times better than Expert because the sandbox of the dungeon is beautifully constrained, the play loop for it elegant and coherent and consistent, and all of this leads to a delving experience that holistically integrates the premise of play with all the resolution machinery. Then Expert tried to port this from the dungeon to the wilderness + city and it became profoundly unwieldy (because one of these things is not like the other...).

Development of hexcrawling and extra-dungeon sandboxing procedures needed a different model.

<snip>

How does a GM present a model that is inferable (deterministic for our purposes here) while simultaneously injecting sufficient dynamism into the system to keep things interesting and non-sterile (stochastic for our purposes here).

As you know I agree with the first para. And the second - I'm posting my own preferred approaches in this thread, though whether they count as "sandboxing" I don't know. They're not exploration oriented, as I've posted.

The question in your third para is a good one. It depends a bit what on counts as "sterile" (cf "meaningful"). If the goal is primarily inference, then that is its own reward regardless of "sterility" (ie non-dynamism). If the goal is something more, then as you know I think there are better and more reliable techniques than the GM's prior establishment of fiction.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Which detail? I'm having trouble following you.

I'll repost:

I asked the players who would be with the four of them if they were scouting ahead to verify whether the band could pass safely through the forest, and they nominated their two NPC hunters - Algol the Bloodthirsty who is in service to Sir Morgath, and Rhan, the woman who had joined them at the end of the last session I posted about.​

​

I was using the Rattling Forest scenario from the Episode Book, and described the "deep and clawing shadows [that[ stretch across the path, and the wind [that] rattles through the trees." The PCs soon found themselves confronted by a knight all in black and wearing a greatsword, with a tattered cape hanging from his shoulders, and six men wielding swords and shields, their clothes equally tattered. The scenario description also mentions that they have "broken trinkets and personal effects" and I described rings and collars that were worn, notched and (in some cases) broken. The description of the collars was taken by the players as a sign that these were Celts (wearing torcs), and I ran with that. . . .​

As I said, I - the GM - was using the Rattling Forest scenario from the Episode Book. I described the forest, as per the quoted text from the book. I told the players they were confronted by the knight and his men, as per the book. I conveyed the scenario description of "broken trinkets and personal effects" and described rings and collars that were worn, notched and (in some cases) broken. The description of those collars was taken by the players as a sign that the NPCs were Celts wearing torcs. I ran with that. It became particularly significant when, to quote myself again, "Sir Justin had the idea of converting these ancient Celtic ghosts to Christianity and the reverence of St Sigobert - 'a Celtic saint' as he emphasised several times - and he also thought that their bones could be put in the reliquary that had been made for martyrs of the order".

All I meant was it seemed like a detail in there, that they were celts, was initiated by the players. I was unclear initially if this was something where, as a matter of procedure in the game, player suggestions automatically became real, or if this was simply you liking their conclusion and going with it. It sounds like the latter. I don't think there is anything wrong with that.

I'm not sure what you mean by "a matter of procedure".

I described the NPCs as wearing (among other things) collars. The players, playing their characters, took this to mean that the NPCs were Celts wearing torcs. They gave voice to this understanding, which is how I knew they had formed it. And I went along with that understanding; eg when they started talking to the lead NPC (the Bone Laird), "Because he was speaking an ancient form of Celtish - not the British the PCs are fluent in - a roll was called for on Presence + Lore. Sir Morgath and Twillany succeeded."

I'm sure there must have been occasions in your own play when a detail wasn't settled in advance. It's literally impossible to settle every potentially salient detail in advance.

When that happened, how did you handle it?

Generally this isn't how my decisions about these kinds of details would be guided but because you had a vacuum, where you didn't establish the detail, and the players proposed something quite plausible, it basically boils down to going with what they said, arriving at another explanation or making it a coin toss. I don't really think it is all that important. I definitely wouldn't make a habit of going with the players explanation though in a sandbox. That is just me

 

[Bedrockgames]

On maps and "fairness" etc: as I've mentioned a few times, in my Prince Valiant game we use maps of Britain and of other parts of Europe, super-imposing a rough conception of 7th to 8th Century CE over the top of them. (For Britain this is done for us via the map on the inside of the Pendragon cover. I also have some photocopies of relevant pages from a historical atlas, which are pretty low-res.)

I'm curious what the sandbox practitioners think of that approach - it's obviously quite different from a discovery-oriented hexcrawl.

Out of curiosity do you take modern day maps and project back a sense of what these would be like in the 7th or 8th century (simply curious)? For what it is worth here, I use historical atlases for historical campaigns. And I don't usually run them with hexes or anything (though I am far from averse from using hex maps of historical places if other people have made them). I also wouldn't say I run my sandbox campaigns as hex crawls.

Personally I think maps are just tools and you need to use what works for you toward whatever goal you are striving for. Presently I do use Hex Maps for my wuxia sandbox, but because most of it is set in a civilized area, the hexes are more for gauging distance and charting courses than to use as discovery hex crawls. When they venture far from civilization or find themselves in a hostile environment like a desert, then I might shift to focus more on individual hexes (but even then, it isn't keyed like Isle of Dread; though there may be key places on the map). I also use hexes to zoom in when I need to flesh out an area.

Also I do play in different modes. When I am running my Ogre Gate sandbox it is very much a you can move about 1 hex a day, and each hex would impose a Survival Roll to avoid encounters or problems. But I have taken a looser wuxia sandbox approach where I only check for encounters every 7 days or so, and the encounters are much more social oriented (more like the encounters you would see between sects in a shaw brothers movie).

I also do what I call small sandboxes, which are more like concepts. I have a chinese supernatural game I run that is intended as monster of the week (intentionally not a sandbox). But I did include sandbox options and because there was some curiosity about it, I put a small sandbox of it on my blog. This isn't how I would run the wuxia sandboxes I was talking about though: THE STARLIT INKSTONE: A STRANGE SANDBOX

 

[Bedrockgames]

On maps and "fairness" etc: as I've mentioned a few times, in my Prince Valiant game we use maps of Britain and of other parts of Europe, super-imposing a rough conception of 7th to 8th Century CE over the top of them. (For Britain this is done for us via the map on the inside of the Pendragon cover. I also have some photocopies of relevant pages from a historical atlas, which are pretty low-res.)

I'm curious what the sandbox practitioners think of that approach - it's obviously quite different from a discovery-oriented hexcrawl.

I don't take an issue with this approach if I understand it. I think historical atlases are really helpful (I also think maps from the time period itself can be very good----where the GM maybe has a more objective historical atlases and the players have something from the period. I also think you can run historical campaigns under the paradigm of the period in questions. For example when I run my Roman campaigns (which usually have a slight supernatural bent) I often use maps based on Pomponius Mela (see here: Pomponius Mela - Wikipedia)

Also I have found google earth helpful for both historical and real world campaigns (it gets very tricky though with historical campaigns sometimes if place names have changed a lot).

 

[Bedrockgames]

So this is an interesting thought and it touches on something I’ve been thinking about as I’ve been catching up on this thread.

Very often, a sandbox is about discovery....the exploration of a geographic space and learning what is out there. Very often, these spaces are described as frontiers, with all the inherent dangers that would imply.

But I don’t think that this is the case for all sandboxes, by any means.

To revisit Blades in the Dark, it’s definitely a sandbox. But the characters are all denizens of the city. They know the sandbox, geographically speaking. So the players’ goal, and the characters’ as well, has to be about some other form of discovery.

Then I was just kind of thinking that there is no actual geography, of course....it’s all fictional, the geography of the map is just an illusion that creates certain pathways. It’s a kind of flow chart.

This format can be applied to the unknown frontier or to the city the characters grew up in, or a space sector or any other setting. It’s just that the setting will demand different uses of the “boxes” on the flowchart.

It seems to me that what’s in each “box” on the flowchart and how it’s determined are, perhaps, the point of differentiation when it comes to sandbox play. Perhaps even all play.

Again, I think this is where living world becomes important. For me it is much less about hex crawl discovery and more about what is there to work with in the setting. My games place a lot of emphasis on sects, grudges, and politics. So if players are seeking to establish their own sect for example, while they may venture into crazy dungeons to obtain a manual with a special technique or go off to the southern lands where they trudge through unknown places in order to gain audience with some powerful being, inside the known world, they are very much more focused on things like arranging a meeting with a rival sect leader, forming an alliance with one of their enemies enemies, securing salt mines in the desert so they have wealth to use for gaining recruits, etc. They may be looking at the geography more from a 'where is the ideal location for our headquarters' kind of thing.

 

[Fenris-77]

Yeah, if the game is focused more on human geography the standard hexcrawl is less than helpful. Personally, I tend to use faces and factions and their web of connections and motivations as the 'map' for that kind of game.